The Best Productivity Apps and Why
Types of Productivity Apps
With the rise of a “grindset” and emphasis on being productive practically 24/7, there is also the rise of productivity tools and self help books. The most popular (and cheapest) productivity tool is in your hand or right next to you: the phone and its apps. But what’s the best productivity app?
I believe there are 3 main types of productivity apps:
- Time restrain
- Organization
- Task managers
Though that last one and organization seem to go a bit hand-in-hand, but there are apps that allow you to create tasks without organizing your time/day and time organizing apps without the ability to create a good task management system.
Though this one isn’t exactly a “productivity” app, I’d be lying if I said ZeeMee didn’t help me during college application season and allowed me to network with people at the college I’m going to.
With that, here are the best productivity apps for college students!
Asana
One of the best task managers that allow you to fully customize tasks with images, files, and due dates. On top of that, Asana allows you to organize tasks by project, customize your workspace and add collaborators.
The app is very intuitive to use and has a free basic plan that includes everything I just said and a maximum of 15 collaborators.
There are business related features such as “portfolios” that track the task completions of all members and the ability to goal set. This doesn’t really apply to college students, but I can foresee that even more people will be using this app in the future and can be used by students to track progress on group projects as well as increasing their personal productivity and goal accomplishments.
Habitica
This app falls under the task manager section because it’s main selling point is to build habits and to act as a habit tracker. Though I already mentioned a task manager app, I like using Habitica to gamify my habits and to create healthier everyday activities, rather than monitoring my progress towards bigger projects.
While Asana is better for bigger projects and monthly, weekly, and yearly goals, Habitica emphasizes the daily, mundane habits that make up the majority of our life.
For example, you can use Habitica to track your consistency for going to the gym, reading for 5 minutes everyday, or even something as small as drinking a glass of water. For accomplishing these tasks, you get in app points, money, and the possibility of earning items in the RPG style habit tracking app.
You can customize your little avatar and your pet by accomplishing more tasks and upgrade your gear and avatar’s abilities. With these abilities, you are able to skip out on daily tasks without facing the repercussions of failing to read or go to the gym today. You can fight habit “monsters” and join guilds with communities of people that want to accomplish the same tasks as you.
On top of the gamifying features, Habitica also has an installable pomodoro timer that you can put onto your computer to up your productivity (time restrain type).
The only downside is that it’s pretty easy to cheat the system and earn points without doing anything, but it is entirely up to the user whether they want to ACTUALLY use Habitica to develop habits or to upgrade their avatar without doing any work.
SimpleCal (or any Calendar)
This app (and any other calendar) falls under the organization because of your ability to time block your schedule.
That’s about it.
While the previous apps were quite complicated, I don’t like complicating time organization apps and just want to see my daily activities and upcoming reminders and tasks/due dates.
You can use any app, I just don’t like using the typical calendar app that comes with the iPhone because it doesn’t show everything block style like the SimpleCal. Other than that, any calendar will do and is a good tool for time blocking your days and getting the most out of your time.
Flora
This one falls under the time restraint app and, despite the fact that I don’t really care about the tree growing part of the app, I really like the timer and the fact that it completely restricts my access to my phone.
Flora is the best time restraint/ timer app because it actually restrains your phone usage (the biggest distraction and killer of productivity).
It lets you set a timer for any amount of time (in increments of 5) where you can’t access pretty much your entire phone or see any notifications in that time. It has built in break times for pomodoro style workers and can quickly start another timer.
I guess the tree part is to motivate you into building a forest to continue using the timer and building trees, but I never really paid attention to it and just use Flora as a really good timer.
My favorite thing is that you can start a timer as soon as you open the app. This app really is a no nonsense type timer that doesn’t distract you with other fancy features.
It’s Up To You
This was my main collection of productivity apps. I’ve used other ones like an app specifically for a pomodoro timer, HabitShare, and multiple planner style apps (at some point they look the same, but Habitica really stood out from all of them). But I haven’t tried all of them, and I like sticking to these 4 because they really work for me.
Productivity has become its own genre, and there are hundreds of thousands of productivity apps out there, so don’t be afraid to experiment with the apps you use for the set of apps you like using!
For my tips to being more productive, click here to how you can change your environment to put yourself in a productive mood!